TEL
AVIV — The Obama administration secretly worked with the Palestinian
Authority to craft a “shameful” United Nations resolution behind
Israel’s back, an Israeli official told reporters on Friday.
The official told Breitbart Jerusalem by email:
“President
Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel
at the UN. The US administration secretly cooked up with the
Palestinians an extreme anti Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back
which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make
the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory. President Obama could
declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but
instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks
decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the
prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”
The official sent the same quotes to major news agencies,
including Reuters and the Associated Press. He spoke as four UN
Security Council members met on Friday to discuss how to advance the
anti-Israel resolution despite Egypt’s decision to delay the vote on the
draft that it introduced. The draft was originally scheduled for vote
yesterday, but was delayed following criticism from Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and President-elect Donald Trump.
After the
meeting, diplomats said the UN will move forward with the vote, which is
expected to take place Friday at about 3 p.m. Eastern (10 p.m. in
Jerusalem).
The text of the resolution repeatedly and wrongly
refers to the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem as
“Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” In actuality, the
Palestinians never had a state in either the West Bank or eastern
Jerusalem and they are not legally recognized as the undisputed
authority in those areas.
Jordan occupied and annexed the West
Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a
defensive war in 1967 after Arab countries used the territories to
launch attacks against the Jewish state. In 1988 Jordan officially
renounced its claims to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
The
text
of the resolution declares that the Israeli settlement enterprise has
“no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under
international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the
two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
It
calls for Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement
activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East
Jerusalem.”
As the Committee for Accuracy for Middle East
Reporting in America (CAMERA) pointed out in an email blast,
international law does not make Israeli settlements illegal.
CAMERA notes:
Article
49 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which is relied upon by those who
claim the settlements are illegal, does not apply in the case of the
West Bank. This is because the West Bank was never under self-rule by a
nation that was a party to the Convention, and therefore there is no
“partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting
Party,” as Article 2 of the Convention specifies. Moreover, even if it
did apply, by its plain terms, it applies only to forcible transfers and
not to voluntary movement. Therefore, it can’t prohibit Jews from
choosing to move to areas of great historical and religious significance
to them.
If the resolution is brought to a vote in its current
form and Obama fails to veto, the resolution would contradict a Bush
administration commitment to allowing some existing Jewish settlements
to remain under a future Israeli-Palestinian deal.
That U.S.
commitment, which the Obama administration has repeatedly violated by
condemning settlement activity, was reportedly a key element in Israel’s
decision to unilaterally evacuate the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The UN
draft resolution text states that “cessation of all Israeli settlement
activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution,” and it
“calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the
negative trends on the ground that are imperiling the two-State
solution.”
In 2004, just prior to the Gaza evacuation, President
Bush issued a declarative letter stating that it is unrealistic to
expect that Israel will not retain some Jewish settlements in a
final-status deal with the Palestinians.
In
light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major
Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the
outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return
to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a
two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to
expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the
basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Elliott
Abrams, the Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy
Strategy during Bush’s second term, was instrumental in brokering
understandings between the U.S. and Israel on settlements. In a June
2009 piece published by the Wall Street Journal, Abrams accused the
Obama administration of “abandoning” those U.S.-Israel understandings by
taking positions critical of all settlement activity.
There
were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding
the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank … principles that
would permit some continuing growth. … They emerged from discussions
with American officials and were discussed by Messrs. Sharon and Bush at
their Aqaba meeting in June 2003. … The prime minister of Israel relied
on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation – the
dissolution of his government, the removal of every single Israeli
citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza, and the removal of
four small settlements in the West Bank. … For reasons that remain
unclear, the Obama administration has decided to abandon the
understandings about settlements reached by the previous administration
with the Israeli government. We may be abandoning the deal now, but we
cannot rewrite history and make believe it did not exist.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment